Background: Mobility limitations represent the third most prevalent cause of disability, affecting more than 1.9 million community-dwelling Canadians. Walking aids are often prescribed to reduce the impacts of mobility impairments. There are limited data on walking aids since 2004. Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate the prevalence of walking aid use in Canada and to explore demographic characteristics among users of walking aids. Design: The design used was a secondary analysis of a cross-sectional national survey...

Introduction: Medical readiness for deployment is arguably the most important component of personnel readiness in the U.S. Army. Administrative documents called profiles provide individualized medical recommendations to the commander regarding how to best provide for a soldier's health and welfare, and contribute to an aggregated enumeration of a unit's overall readiness to deploy. Profiles that convey behavioral health (BH) limitations thus reflect what can be called the "behavioral health readiness" of the force...

Introduction: We aimed to determine the prospective association of smoking status, smoking intensity, and smoking cessation with the risk of hearing loss in a large Japanese cohort. Methods: The cohort study included 50195 employees, who were aged 20-64 years and free of hearing loss at baseline. Participants were followed up for a maximum of 8 years. Pure-tone audiometric testing was performed annually to identify hearing loss at 1 and 4 kHz. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to investigate the association between smoking and hearing loss...

Summary: Genomic sequences are assembled into a variable, but large number of contigs that should be scaffolded (ordered and oriented) for facilitating comparative or functional analysis. Finding scaffolding is computationally challenging due to misassemblies, inconsistent coverage across the genome, and long repeats. An accurate assessment of scaffolding tools should take into account multiple locations of the same contig on the reference scaffolding rather than matching a repeat to a single best location...

Overexpression of P-glycoprotein (P-gp) leads to the emergence of multidrug resistance (MDR) in cancer treatment. Acridones have the potential to reverse MDR and sensitize cells. In the present study, we aimed to elucidate the chemosensitization potential of acridones by employing various molecular modelling techniques. Pharmacophore modeling was performed for the dataset of chemosensitizing acridones earlier proved for cytotoxic activity against MCF7 breast cancer cell line. Gaussian-based QSAR studies also performed to predict the favored and disfavored region of the acridone molecules...

The isolated microbial Alcaligenes sp. S3 from the agricultural field was used for the biodegradation of synthetic wastewater containing atrazine. This study was conducted in an alternating aerobic-anoxic lab scale pilot plant. The performance of continuously operated pilot plant was evaluated in three different phases with varying atrazine concentration. The best performance of plant was observed in phase-II. The atrazine (200 mg/L) having COD value 1356 mg/L was used with varying flow rate and 90.56% COD removal was obtained at a flow rate of 300 mL/h on 122th day of operation...

Sandy beaches are unique ecosystems increasingly exposed to human-induced pressures. Consistent with emerging frameworks promoting this holistic approach towards beach management, is the need to improve the integration of social data into management practices. This paper aims to increase understanding of links between demographics and community values and preferred beach activities, as key components of the social dimension of the beach environment. A mixed method approach was adopted to elucidate users' opinions on beach preferences and community values through a survey carried out in Manly Local Government Area in Sydney Harbour, Australia...

Children who enter the child protection system often have complex family problems and have experienced early adverse experiences. Using latent class analysis, this study aimed to identify family classes of child protection cases in Singapore, to ascertain the prevalence of these family classes, and to test the association of family class membership to subsequent recurrence of harm. A sample of 440 cases who entered the Child Protective Service in Singapore was analyzed based on eight familial factors on the household and caregiver levels...

Vaginal birth after caesarean (VBAC) delivery remains a controversial topic, and one for which there is a lack of robust data to guide clinicians and parturients regarding their best option for mode of delivery in a subsequent pregnancy. In many developed countries the trend observed in recent years is that of progressively reduced VBAC rates, and hence increased use of elective repeat caesarean section (ERCS). This factor has contributed, more than any other, to the disproportionately high caesarean section (CS) rates in many countries...

Gas chromatography (GC) hyphenated with nitrogen chemiluminescence detection (NCD) and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (QTOFMS) was applied for the first time to the quantitative analysis of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in urine, based on the N-equimolar response of NCD. A method was developed and validated to estimate the concentrations of three metabolites of the common stimulant NPS α-pyrrolidinovalerophenone (α-PVP) in spiked urine samples, simulating an analysis having no authentic reference standards for the metabolites and using the parent drug instead for quantitative calibration...

BACKGROUND: Cancer-related infections lead to increases in mortality, antibiotic use, and hospital stays. Other adverse outcomes include dose delays and reductions, which can result in suboptimal treatment outcomes. OBJECTIVES: Effective implementation of risk assessment and evidence-based interventions for the prevention and treatment of infection are essential to improve care and reduce costs related to infections in patients with cancer receiving immunosuppressive therapy...

BACKGROUND: Cisplatin has been used as a chemotherapeutic agent to treat many different cancers. A well-known side effect of cisplatin is nephrotoxicity, which is the primary dose-limiting toxicity. Hydration in conjunction with appropriate diuresis can decrease the incidence of nephrotoxicity. OBJECTIVES: This article aims to identify best practices in supportive therapy for patients receiving cisplatin therapy. METHODS: A team was assembled to review research-based evidence and summarize recommendations to address appropriate hydration regimens and forced diuresis for patients receiving cisplatin chemotherapy...

The opioid pharmacological profile of cis -(-)- N -normetazocine derivatives is deeply affected by the nature of their N -substituents. Here, our efforts were focused on the synthesis and pharmacological evaluation of novel derivatives of the lead LP1, a multitarget opioid analgesic compound featuring an N -phenylpropanamido substituent. LP1 derivatives 5a - d and 6a - d were characterized by flexible groups at the N -substituent that allow them to reposition themselves relative to cis -(-)- N -normetazocine nucleus, thus producing different pharmacological profiles at the mu, delta and kappa opioid receptors (MOR, DOR and KOR) in in vitro and in vivo assays...

BACKGROUND: Many studies have confirmed that the size and location of necrotic lesions are major factors that affect the prevalence of collapse and prognosis in patients with osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH). Although several classification systems categorize and quantify ONFH, there is no agreement on which one is most useful for the purpose. QUESTIONS/PURPOSES: We compared the Steinberg, modified Kerboul, and Japanese Investigation Committee (JIC) classifications of ONFH in terms of (1) the correlation among the three different classification systems...

STUDY DESIGN: Laboratory study. OBJECTIVE: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) derived from whole bone marrow aspirate (BMA) and MSCs derived from density-gradient centrifugation were isolated from vertebral bodies and cultured under either hypoxic or normoxic conditions to evaluate their biological characteristics and HOX and TALE signature able to improve spinal surgery procedures. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: The use of spinal fusion procedures has increased over the last decades; however, failed fusion still remains an important problem...

PURPOSE: In this study, we aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of intravitreal conbercept in patients with treatment-naive neovascular age-related macular degeneration in real-life setting. METHODS: Three consecutive intravitreal injections of conbercept following a pro re nata protocol. The main outcomes were the changes of Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study best-corrected visual acuity and central retinal thickness between the baseline and the 12th month...

OBJECTIVE: The protective effect of ART has not yet been definitively established in men who have sex with men (MSM). We aimed to characterize the factors associated with persistent HIV-1 RNA rectal shedding. METHODS: Prospective study including virologically-suppressed MSM from an HIV cohort. High-resolution anoscopy (HRA) was performed for screening of anal dysplasia, and rectal sampling for HIV-1 RNA quantification and sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) investigation through multiplex PCR...

Fluorine-doped VOsub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;(M) nanoparticles have been successfully synthesized using the hydrothermal method at a supercritical temperature of 490°C. The pristine VO&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;(M) has the critical phase transformation temperature of 64°C. The morphology and homogeneity of the monoclinic structure VO&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;(M) were adopted by the fluorine-doped system. The crystallinity and particle size were reduced the bigger the concentration of fluorine doping...

Magnetocrystalline anisotropy, the microscopic origin of permanent magnetism, is often explained in terms of ferromagnets. However, the best performing permanent magnets based on rare earths and transition metals (RE-TM) are in fact ferrimagnets, consisting of a number of magnetic sublattices. Here we show how a naive calculation of the magnetocrystalline anisotropy of the classic RE-TM ferrimagnet GdCo_{5} gives numbers that are too large at 0 K and exhibit the wrong temperature dependence. We solve this problem by introducing a first-principles approach to calculate temperature-dependent magnetization versus field (FPMVB) curves, mirroring the experiments actually used to determine the anisotropy...